<img src="http://insidermedia.ign.com/insider/image/gcpre_harrypotter.jpg" width="217" height="167" align="right" border="0" alt="Threat to LOTR? Or an appetizer before the main feast?" />Threat to LOTR? Or an appetizer before the main feast? Well the Burger King mug was fun. So was seeing Harry Potter. It was a good, entertaining movie and now that it's out of the way I don't have to be cross with it anymore. And I was -- for the longest time, since about this summer, I held a grudge against Harry Potter because he was taking attention away from The Lord of the Rings. But now that I've seen it I'm not too worried that people are going to mix them up.

The movie was a little too long, but it was very faithful to the book, which is a good thing. I read the Harry Potter books, at least the first one. I read it about a year and a half ago, when the craze first really started catching on. It's good to see that nowadays filmmakers, when they do adapt books, seem to be much more sensitive to the wishes of the hardcore fans, keeping as much of the integrity and structure of the original book intact as possible. You see that most definitely in Columbus' Harry Potter, and we already know we'll see it in Lord of the Rings. This is a far cry from say Dune or Blade Runner, which got pretty far away from the content of the stories they were based on.

As far as the book itself goes, I found it to be a well-written, clever, and imaginative story. It's a fun adventure, but not really comparable to the trilogy, for it lacks that epic tone, that earnest seriousness and pageantry that makes Tolkien's work so great. Don't get me wrong, Harry Potter is charming too in its own way, but it's a young adult fantasy, more like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or James and the Giant Peach, than Lord of the Rings. Even The Hobbit is closer to it. It's definitely fantasy lite.